The traditional telco caller ID is antiquated and does not provide adequate information about the caller. Existing solutions give little detail or indication as to who may be calling and are limited to caller ID/name or account names. Existing solutions for reaching an individual person with voice or video communications generally rely on large infrastructure within an organization or the user having dedicated and complicated setups.
Also lacking is an adequate solution allowing call recipients to rate system abusers or those who negatively utilize the system (i.e. crank callers, telemarketers and fax “spammers”), or to set preferences for handling different call sources i.e. public call versus internal call, corporate call versus personal call.
With the recent rise and proliferation of social media networks, the social graph comes into the spotlight. Today most social media networks are web-based and also provide means for people to interact with each other through e-mail, instant messaging, online chats etc. Social media networks allow people to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks. Social media networks have a wealth of information about users and their connections in the form of a social graph. A social graph is a representation of the interconnection of relationships in an online social network. A social graph is a mapping of people and how they are related or connected to other people. The links between people in social networks are of different types; and the different types of relationships can be a friend, a co-worker, a family member, a classmate, a schoolmate etc.
Typically a social media network stores a representation of each person via a profile; each person's social connections and their interests. Profiles often have a section dedicated to comments from friends and other users. To protect user privacy, social networks typically have controls that allow users to choose who can view their profile, contact them, add them to their list of contacts, and so on.
Given this wealth of information being available about the user on social media network(s), it would be desirable to utilize this information when users are calling or being called.